Instead of seeing housing or job listings, visitors to the site were greeted with a message that said, "Unable to process request, please try again." However, the entire site didn't appear to be affected, as basic site information pages are still accessible.

The site's system status page reported that it had recognized the outage around 9 a.m. PDT: "we're poking around for a fix (vigorously accelerated poking)." Full access to the site appeared to have been restored about three hours later, but some users scattered around the country reported continued problems with access.

The cause of the outage was not reported, and calls to Craigslist representatives for comment were not immediately returned.